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This three-part series explores the approaches to a successful cloud journey, including Mindtree’s seven stages of effective cloud transformation, choosing the right anchor partner, plus real-world case studies of global leaders that have benefited from the journey.

Where is your business on the cloud spectrum? Here, we identify the seven stages of a successful cloud journey—so you can position your company’s own cloud initiatives along the maturity spectrum—and what you should look for in a partner to help you achieve long-term success.

Stage 1: Cloud strategy

The first stage in the journey is developing a strategic cloud plan that includes a clear starting point, a comprehensive road map and measurable business goals. All business stakeholders must be involved in developing the strategic plan to ensure that cloud project objectives align with core business goals. Their involvement also helps build consensus for managing the organizational and workforce changes that will ensue.

At this first stage, look for an anchor partner that helps you develop customized business cases with metrics-driven ROI road maps. They should also help you evaluate the best cloud approach (public, private or hybrid) and cloud deployment type (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) to achieve your strategic goals—including readiness assessments, change management and audits that examine security and system architecture needs.

Stage 2: Portfolio analysis

Once the master plan and strategic goals are compiled and agreed upon, the next stage determines the proper sequence of migrating applications and data. The stage begins with a current state analysis, followed by an application-to-cloud fitment analysis, and migration plans and timelines.

Choose a partner that closely assists you with these analysis tasks. Your partner should create a single view of your company’s application infrastructure to help you identify and prioritize the enterprise systems, applications and data that need to move to the cloud.

Stage 3: Cloud build

Building an agile, cloud-first environment that aligns with your organization’s business objectives requires pulling together foundational elements.

Select a partner that offers complete cloud data-center design, sizing and build services, as well as cloud-based business application development services.

Stage 4: Cloud migration

By this stage, your IT team has developed a cloud migration strategy by identifying which applications and environments should be migrated based on budget, schedule and business priorities, and has a cloud design in hand. What happens now is the actual migration to a cloud platform.

Make sure your partner provides world-class expertise in customer experience and data analytics applications and infrastructure. They should have road-tested cloud migration services that feature predefined templates designed for specific workloads to ensure a faster, more cost-effective and successful transition, while greatly reducing risk and business impact.

Stage 5: Cloud native

Implementing a cloud native solution can be a complex and time-consuming undertaking. It requires a strong understanding of today’s workforce and partner ecosystem. It also requires the ability to deliver insights from data at speed, build fault-tolerant systems and create architectures to drive innovation.

Look for a partner that delivers cloud native services with enterprise collaboration, continuously available business platforms, serverless architectures and SaaS implementation and integration. You want a partner with resilient, scalable cloud native services that improve your business processes to promote greater productivity and innovation of your workforce and partners.

Stage 6: Cloud governance

The governance stage is essential for measuring the effectiveness of principles and processes. Most companies need help managing metering, billing and chargebacks for cost-efficiency gains. They also need guidance when incorporating best practices and new processes with existing IT governance policies, boards and tools.

While you may already be successful in the cloud, this stage is where many organizations struggle with a fragmented approach to managing cloud performance and utilization. At the cloud management stage, you want an experienced partner who can help you clarify issues and maximize performance and productivity.

Look for a partner with a real-time monitoring platform that can assess your cloud performance and utilization from a single view of applications and infrastructure activity for greater value and insight.

These seven stages should help you determine where your organization is on the cloud journey—and where you want to be. In the next part of this series, you’ll learn how to choose the right anchor partner that can support you at every stage.

Interested in learning more about how Mindtree can guide your organization to cloud-first success?

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About the author

AVP and Head – Big Data, Data Science, Cloud, DevOps for Digital Business

Manoj Karanth

Manoj Karanth leads Big Data Analytics and Cloud Solutions for Mindtree’s Digital Business. He works with Global 2000 clients to accelerate their cloud-first journey and become insight-driven businesses using Cloud-native technology platforms of Mindtree. Manoj has built the technology center of excellence with leading Cloud and Data Analytics partners to deliver differentiated digital solutions. He has lived Cloud and Product Engineering through his nearly two decade career.

Mindtree [NSE: MINDTREE] delivers digital transformation and technology services from ideation to execution, enabling Global 2000 clients to outperform the competition. “Born digital,” Mindtree takes an agile, collaborative approach to creating customized solutions across the digital value chain. At the same time, our deep expertise in infrastructure and applications management helps optimize your IT into a strategic asset. Whether you need to differentiate your company, reinvent business functions or accelerate revenue growth, we can get you there.